PUSHING PAPER

13. Prefuse 73 — One Word Extinguisher (2003)

12. High On Fire — Death Is This Communion (2007)

11. Kanye West — Late Registration (2005)

I’d be surprised if Kanye ever tops this one. The College Dropout is too long and uneven. (Although I will say this: I’ve read a couple pieces about that album lately that reminded me of how original it sounded upon its release. That’s easy to forget since there’s been an army of Kanye imitators in its wake.) Graduation is really good, but it lacks its predecessors eclecticism, which was my favorite aspect of Kanye’s first two albums. And 808s and Heartbreak, which I loved when it came out, didn’t age well for me — I would die a happy man if I never hear “Heartless” again. But Late Registration is one of the decade’s true masterpieces to me, even beyond my own tastes. Sometimes I wonder how long Kanye can continue his run of brilliance, or if it’s already over. No musical artist can keep it going forever. But regardless of what the future holds for Kanye, my God, what a decade.

10. Radiohead — Kid A (2000)

To all the haters: This is the album of the decade, at least if you’re evaluating music that exists within the rock idiom. Yeah, I know, Brian Eno did a lot of this shit before, and so did a ton of other bands that you know that pretty much no one else does. In the words of Derrick Coleman, whoop de damn do. OK Computer was as critically acclaimed as an album can be, anticipation was sky high for whatever their follow-up ended up being, and Radiohead still exceeded the world’s considerable expectations. Maybe Kid A isn’t quite as original as a lot of people made it out to be, but it changed a hell of a lot of people’s musical tastes. There aren’t many examples in rock history when a band had such scrutiny and attention placed upon them, and not only released a classic, but made an album with such a strong gravitational pull that, for years after its release, every other great album in its wake will inevitably be compared to it. Part of this is because it came out in 2000, but every single rock album that people lost their shit over this decade had to answer to Kid A. Even though I balked at the Church of Radiohead in my blurb for In Rainbows, I can’t deny that statement. For any piece of music to be truly great and truly memorable, it has toe the line between technical brilliance and touching as many people as possible. In this decade, no album struck that balance nearly as well as Kid A.

9. Brian Wilson — Smile (2004)

Does this album count? I mean, the best songs on this album came out in the Sixties, which normally should instantly disqualify it, but surely we should give this album a pass since for years and years it was the most famous album never released, and was masterfully, improbably coordinated by an old man who’d lost his mind dozens of times. If Kid A had impossibly high expectations that Radiohead somehow surpassed, Smile had it even worse. After all, it was supposed to better than Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper’s. I just remember being utterly shocked by how good it ended up being, and then listening to it day after day after day.

8. At the Drive-In — Relationship of Command (2000)

Around the time when this album came out, I was totally in the midst of a big-time angry young man phase, and Relationship of Command was pretty much a perfect distillation of everything I ever wanted to hear in a band. The guitars were angular as hell, the vocals were razor sharp, and kick-ass basslines were never too far down in the mix. Now that I’ve been fully swallowed up by the corporate world, visceral emotions, especially anger, are a thing of the past for me, and my zeal for a lot of the punk and post-punk music I once loved so much has faded. (Given that my consumer habits mirrored that of someone whose primary goal in life is to own every Dischord album, it really had nowhere to go but down.) But you know what? THIS ALBUM IS STILL FUCKING AWESOME. Even though I hadn’t listened to this album for a while at the time, finding out that “One Armed Scissor” was going to be in Guitar Hero was one of the watershed moments of my life. Even better was when I played it for the first time and it was as fun as a video game, or life itself, could possibly be. So, all high on GH mania, I started listening to Relationship of Command again, and I loved every song as much as I once did. Throw in an irresistible sense of childhood nostalgia, and you’ve got my eighth favorite album of the decade.

7.  Optimo — How to Kill the DJ, Pt. 2 (2004)

This ranking really is for disc one, which had a massive impact on my musical tastes. Basically, the dudes from Optimo are what I hope to be when I’m their age — veritable encyclopedias of seemingly every style of music that came out in their lifetimes. How to Kill the DJ was the first DJ mix I really got into, and for as many DJ mixes I’ve downloaded in the years since it came out, I’ve yet to find any other DJs I like nearly as much as Optimo. No one else that I’ve found has a similar approach — take as many different styles of music as possible, find common threads that only the most attuned ears could hear without being prompted, and tie them all together seamlessly. Put it this way: for our honeymoon, I think we’re going to Scotland, and destination number one for me is going to be Sunday night at the Sub Club in Glasgow.

6. Sufjan Stevens — Illinois (2005)

When the backlash against Sufjan hit, it completely stunned me, even though looking back it was inevitable. After all, when you release three incredible albums in a row, topping things off with an insanely ambitious concept album that’s a total masterpiece, no wonder people decided they hated him. (Oh wait, that makes no sense at all. Maybe the world is just full of contrary jerks.) What bothered me most about the whole thing is that I feel like Sufjan was held up as the quintessential example of how indie rock became the favored style of music for all the world’s pussies. Even though I thought it was poorly executed, I pretty much agreed with every thing about Sasha Frere-Jones’s infamous “A Paler Shade of White” essay, the very thought of Sufjan getting lumped in with crap like the Decemberists offends me. Maybe the boy-girl ratio at Sufjan’s shows will never be as out-of-whack as I assume it used to be at Bathory or Geto Boys concerts, but Sufjan the fact that Sufjan has an unparalleled gift for wrenching emotion out of things like a UFO landing or a flying cartoon in tights shouldn’t be held against him. I know the whole fifty states-fifty albums thing was always a joke, but surely it can’t be too much for Sufjan to give it just one more go.